When the late Dolly Parton recently explained that she had neglected her own health while caring for her late husband, five words resonated immediately:
“I didn’t take care of myself.”
Caregiving often rearranges the hierarchy of what matters. Everything revolves around the person you’re caring for: their appointments; their medications; their changing condition. There is always another conversation with a health professional, another form, another decision.
Your own needs can wait. Neglecting yourself does not feel like neglect. It feels like prioritizing.
This tendency is exacerbated by a health-care and social system that tends to treat caregivers and those they care for as two separate camps. We imagine two people: the person who needs care and the caregiver who provides it. One is vulnerable; the other is capable. One needs support; the other supplies it.
Yet, caregivers can also be vulnerable. They can have disabilities or develop illnesses. They age. They often have their own jobs, children and financial pressures.
In my own life, I experienced this firsthand. While caring for my uncle, I was simultaneously navigating profound hearing loss.
It is well known that demand for care will increase as Canada’s population ages. Already, more than eight million Canadians provide care, according to 2026 research by the Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence. The conventional question is where Canada will find enough people to meet this burgeoning demand.
But a critical question that is often overlooked is how we plan to properly care for this population of caregivers.
The approach most commonly taken right now is inadequate. We tell caregivers to exercise self-care, but fail to ensure they are really equipped to do so.
What is needed instead is a comprehensive strategy articulated in a National Caregiving Strategy. In my view, this strategy would touch on several key points:
For one, it would encourage health-care providers to ask about caregivers’ well-being as part of care planning for patients. This is particularly necessary for family caregivers.
Many provinces now offer social prescribing, which is where health-care professionals refer patients to community organizations to help reduce their social isolation. Those organizations then help individuals determine what support they need.
Some provinces are now going further, offering social prescribing for caregivers. This should be adopted more broadly.
Second, employers should recognize that caregiving creates sustained demand on some employees, requiring flexibility and some reasonable accommodations at work.
Third, there is a need for a dedicated focus on caregivers with disabilities. Our current health-care and social systems place many barriers to being an effective caregiver for such individuals.
For example, while caring for my uncle while losing my hearing, I found I often struggled to access information in a way that enabled me to participate in his care.
Health information and services must be accessible so caregivers with disabilities can participate fully.
None of these can be treated as peripheral supports. They are part of maintaining the care infrastructure on which Canada increasingly depends.
For many Canadians, caring for someone we love is not something we would have chosen to avoid. There can be tenderness, meaning and even privilege in being there when someone needs us most.
But love alone does not make the caregiver invincible.
Perhaps that is why Dolly Parton’s five words — “I didn’t take care of myself — were so instantly recognizable. She articulated something that caregivers often understand only after their own needs have been repeatedly pushed aside.
Canada should hear those words as more than a celebrity’s reflection on a difficult period in her life. They are a warning about a caregiving system that too often assumes the caregiver will be all right.
Sometimes, the person doing the caring is struggling too.
Because of a stroke of luck, my disabled adult child and I are dual citizens of both Canada and another country. I truly love Canada and I want to live in Canada but we instead live outside Canada because frankly, Canada’s supports for family caretakers are at best utterly pathetic and at worse essentially nonexistent. We are extremely luck that we were essentially handed the gift of dual citizenship in a country that does support family caregivers adequately and I am grateful every day for that. I hate feeling that way but it is the reality. I love Canada but I hate how Canada has decided to just disregard family caretakers. Most Canadians don’t have the options we do. Most countries will not let a disabled person move there unless they are already a citizen. We were lucky. My hear breaks for the average Canadian family caretaker who doesn’t have options.
Antiquated and arbitrary rules like not compensating live-in and/or family caregivers are really just there to get away with the government receiving the benefit of uncompensated labor because either way the labor is being performed.
Recently the court in Ontario ruled that parents of disabled children must essentially care for their children for life – but of course without any compensation. As the issue of family caretaker compensation continues, I suspect we will see more court rulings. Next it will be that children must care for their parents, and siblings must care for each other. It will be sold as familial responsibility and yet conveniently the result will be essentially forced slavery. While the concept of family caring for family sounds nice – it doesn’t pay the bills. When you are working without compensation every waking moment for the benefit of someone else, regardless of who they are – HOW DO YOU PAY THE BILLS?